Diaspora
Dinners

Kamin Mohammadi

Arriving in London in 1979, fresh from the terror of the Iranian Revolution and the dawning of the subsequent Islamic Republic, everything was strange, new, subdued. The weather was dull, the traffic hummed rather than roared, and pedestrians were quiet.

In Iran, everything was vivid. The sky was azure blue, the midday light made you wince, and cars and pedestrians weaved around each other in a cacophony of horns and exclamations.

My family was large and extended. Their love was noisy and easily expressed, their humour raucous, and whenever we gathered, the only thing that ever brought a hush to the room was in the first moments a meal was served.

For the time it took to set the table – the sofreh, usually a huge tablecloth spread on the floor around which large cushions to lounge on were placed, as our numbers were too numerous to sit around our Western-style dining tables – there was something approaching silence. Just the noise of numerous dishes being carefully carried and set down by us children where our mothers and aunts instructed us, and the appreciative ‘bah bah’ of the rest of the family as the smells of the dishes diffused through the house.

Our meals didn’t contain courses, but each dish was accompanied by baskets of fresh herbs; bowls of fresh, home-made yoghurt; and jars of different pickles.

Steaming bowls of khoreshts (different stews combining vegetables, herbs, and meat in ingenious ways); trays of saffron-stained rice; large plates of tahdig, the crispy rice that nearly burns at the bottom of the rice pan.

There would be whole fishes, their bellies stuffed with aromatic herbs before being cooked on an outdoor grill; skewers of lamb kebabs that the men would be in charge of barbecuing outside; golden chicken legs that had been marinated in saffron and lemon for a day before being thrown on the fire.

Alongside this there would be polo dishes: complete meals of rice combined with specific herbs, vegetables, even fruit, and meat, often sprinkled with slivers of cut pistachio or almond.

Our meals were one course, but that course contained multitudes, and kept us busy and – relatively – silent for the time it took us to be served and tuck in.

Abundance and generosity are the hallmarks of Iranian hospitality, and our food embodied this ethos. It also adhered to the ancient Iranian medicinal system which demanded certain combinations to respect and support good health and wellbeing.

The cornerstones of how we eat – the handfuls of fresh herbs between mouthfuls, the accompaniment of pickles, pomegranates sprinkled on meat and rice dishes, the myriad yoghurt dishes mixed with various herbs and vegetables (tzatziki is just one of those dishes) – popped up in the West decades after our migration, labelled as ‘superfoods’, and carrying a similarly souped-up price tag.

Famous chefs packaged and sold our baberries, our curdled whey, our ubiquitous saffron, and our fragrant damask rose under their own labels – lumping our cuisine in with the food of our neighbours when, actually, Iranian food stands alone in the region as having no culinary brethren.

The modest kotlet could be dressed up on a silver platter and garnished with parsley, tomatoes, and pickles; or it could be slipped between any of our myriad Iranian flatbreads, combined with tomato, and pickled cucumber, to make the world’s most delicious sandwich

We may have stuffed vine leaves, but we make them more sour than the Greeks or the Turks. We may have stews that resemble curries, but the mix of herbs and spices is different to those of India and Pakistan or Moroccan tagines.

Iranian rice, with its long fragrant grains bathed in butter and saffron, bears little resemblance to the rice of other cultures.

The delicacy of the Iranian palette, the medicinal rules that govern flavour combinations, and the Persian propensity to sourness offset by a hint of sweet is unique in the world.

London in 1979 simply could not compete with this colourful, flavourful abundance.

As a child of nine, among all the strange new things, the memory that has stayed with me was watching British people at the supermarket buy just one orange, one banana, and one apple – where were the kilos of peaches, the piles of jewel-like grapes, the kilos of small slim cucumbers we ate as snacks? How could sprigs of mint exist in those small plastic trays when I was used to seeing herbs carried in armfuls?

Britain at the end of the 1970s was not a multicultural place with a vibrant food scene. For me, it was a pale facsimile of the life we had abandoned when the mullahs took our country from us.

In those first years, my mother struggled to find the ingredients for many of our dishes. But the one thing she was always able to make – a truly versatile dish that worked as well on the sofreh as it did in my school lunchbox – was kotlet: meat and potato patties that could be eaten hot or cold.

The modest kotlet could be dressed up on a silver platter and garnished with parsley, tomatoes, and pickles; or it could be slipped between any of our myriad Iranian flatbreads, combined with tomato, and pickled cucumber, to make the world’s most delicious sandwich. Or it could be eaten cold from the fridge, standing up, with a dollop of natural yoghurt (as my mother often caught me doing).

To this day, I am surprised that some marketing-savvy celebrity chef hasn’t yet packaged up our humble kotlet for a chain of sandwich shops.

It’s my go-to recipe when I feel far from home, when I miss my huge family, and when the sadness of knowing we can never all be gathered around one sofreh together again feels overwhelming.

That’s when I get my hands into the kotlet mixture and, while kneading and shaping the patties, I am taken back to my grandmother’s kitchen – to its stone floor and complex smell of mixed spices, ground saffron, and dried rose petals; with its soundtrack of my family’s loving cacophony.

And in this act of mixing, kneading, and frying, I feel myself once again – wrapped in my family’s love, a part of my lineage, of my country, and I am comforted.